NIGERIA

Incurable, but preventable
IN A clearing close to the entrance of Kenya’s Meru National Park, a bronze statue of a buffalo can be seen standing on a plinth. Despite the best efforts of local elephants who occasionally mistake it for a real buffalo and attack it, it is there to commemorate the site of the final outbreak of rinderpest, a cattle disease similar to measles, which was eradicated in 2011.
Rinderpest has plagued Africa and other parts of the world ever since cattle were domesticated. In the 1980s an outbreak, originating in Sudan, killed millions of bovines across the continent. Eradication was a triumph of veterinary medicine, as rinderpest became only the second disease, either animal or human, to be wiped out, the first being smallpox.
It is exciting, therefore, that a tea

STUBBORN and self-serving, Khalifa Haftar has long been seen as a spoiler of efforts to end the conflict in Libya. The forces under his command in the self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA) have mostly added to the chaos, not helped to resolve it. Yet General Haftar was greeted like a statesman by Emmanuel Macron, the French president, in Paris on July 25th. There he encountered Fayez al-Serraj, a rival who leads the UN-backed government based in Tripoli, the capital. Their first meeting, three months earlier, produced nothing. So it came as something of a shock when the two leaders announced a ceasefire and their intention to hold elections in 2018.
“The cause of peace has made great progress,” declared Mr Macron. In fact, the deal is but a small step. More agreements are needed before

IN CRISP white uniforms and standing to attention beneath a fluttering red flag with five golden stars, the sailors on board the People’s Liberation Army ships setting sail for Djibouti on July 11th represent a significant step for China. When they arrive they will open the Middle Kingdom’s first military base abroad since the Korean war.
It is a canny first foray. China has prepared the ground with low-key deployments of blue-helmeted troops to UN operations in places such as South Sudan. And it has placed the base in a country that is likely to cause the least offence.
America already has a large airfield and naval station in Djibouti. From there it conducts counter-terrorism operations, and watches the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, both much used by smugglers trafficking drugs, weap

THE first rule for public-relations firms is not to become the story. In South Africa Bell Pottinger, a British firm, has done just that. In May, e-mails between one of the firm’s employees and Duduzane Zuma, a son of President Jacob Zuma, were leaked to South African newspapers. Bell Pottinger had been hired by a company owned by the Gupta family, a trio of Indian businessmen brothers who are chummy with the president, to bolster their image.
One can see why they might seek such help. A report by a former public protector last year accused them of orchestrating “state capture” on behalf of the president, and their names have become a campaign slogan for the opposition. The e-mails showed how the firm had proposed to push the idea that criticism of the president—and the Gupta family—was

Osinbajo the loyal
POLITICS is the survival of the fittest, and Nigeria is no exception. “The Hyenas and the Jackals will soon be sent out of the kingdom,” the first lady, Aisha Buhari, wrote on Facebook on July 10th, in response to a senator who had described her husband as “the absent Lion King”. Muhammadu Buhari has been in London being treated for a mysterious illness since May 7th, after spending a seven-week stint there earlier this year. His only recent communication has been a few written statements mourning deceased politicians.
Despite many rumours, Mr Buhari is probably not dead himself. The vice-president (and acting president), Yemi Osinbajo, rushed to London for a few hours last week. On his return he said his boss was recovering fast and would be back “very shortly”. But

FOR two years Ghanem al Masarir al-Dosari, a Saudi satirist, has fronted an online comic look at the news in a show called “Fadfada” (Natter), which pokes fun at his kingdom’s royal highnesses. He portrays the young crown prince and de facto ruler, Muhammad bin Salman, in nappies, and calls him “al-dub al-dasher”, loosely translated as “fat crumpet”. His YouTube channel attracts millions of followers, most of them Saudi. “Back home, I’d have lost my head,” he says. But Mr Dosari broadcasts from the safety of a north London suburb, he hopes out of reach of the royal sword.
Ever since the leading pan-Arab newspaper, Asharq al-Awsat, launched in Britain in 1978, London has served as an Arab media hub. Fleeing the censors at home, journalists found freedom in exile. Fresh crackdowns, censor

Not the real thing
THE traditional way is not always the most successful. Saudi Arabian border guards this month arrested a Sudanese man accused of smuggling more than half a million drug tablets into the kingdom from Jordan on the back of a camel. Just as tastes in food and drink vary from region to region, so do preferences for drugs. The one the Sudanese man was allegedly trafficking, known as Captagon, is the Arabian peninsula’s most popular illegal drug. True Captagon (generic name: fenethylline) was produced as a treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. America banned it in 1981 after its addictive and other pernicious characteristics became clear. Most other countries have followed suit.
The pills flooding into Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states sometimes have a fe

WHEN a group of teenage boys scrawled “down with the regime” on their school wall they lit the powder that ignited Syria’s civil war. Ever since their torture at the hands of state-security agents in March 2011, the boys’ home city of Deraa has become synonymous with the rebellion to overthrow the regime of Bashar al-Assad. But Deraa may yet turn out to be the place where dreams of overthrowing the regime finally die.
The guns fell silent over the battered city at noon on July 9th as a ceasefire brokered by Russia and America came into force. The truce, announced by Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin after their first meeting, is the latest in a string of failed attempts by the two powers to quell more than six years of violence that has killed perhaps 400,000 people. Its succes

FIRST came the Iran nuclear deal; then the Cuban thaw. But less remarked upon at the time was Barack Obama’s rapprochement with another old foe: Sudan, whose president, Omar al-Bashir, is wanted by the International Criminal Court on charges of orchestrating genocide. In January Mr Obama temporarily lifted economic sanctions on Sudan that had first been imposed 20 years ago by Bill Clinton. The move was a reward for “positive actions” by Sudan. The regime has co-operated with America in fighting terrorism, allowed more aid workers to reach civilians hurt in Sudan’s conflict zones and tried to end its wars with rebels in the south. Yet the decision on whether to end sanctions permanently fell to Mr Obama’s successor.
On July 11th Donald Trump ducked the decision for another three months,

THE smell hits you from a mile away. On the southern edge of Gaza City the crystalline blue Mediterranean is being transmuted into a vast, bobbing pool of raw sewage, the product of half a million people with nowhere else for their effluent to flow. A three-way row between Gaza, the West Bank and Israel has seen electricity supplies cut to a trickle. One casualty has been the strip’s sewage treatment stations.
It is ten years since Hamas, an Islamist political party with a lethal military wing, took over Gaza. In June 2007 it threw out its rivals from Fatah, the nationalist faction that runs the Palestine Liberation Organisation. A year earlier, it had beaten Fatah in elections held in the territories occupied by Israel during the 1967 war. The split left Fatah to rule the West Bank, Ha